How To Do A French Accent
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How To Do A French Accent
There are many sounds that are spoken in the French language that differ from sound's that are heard in the English language. In this tutorial an actor teaches how to speak with a French accent in English.
Hello I'm an actor and a voice coach. I teach people how to make changes to their voice.
Alright the key to any accent is to find out the sounds that are specific to that accent and try and copy them. So for the French accent lets start with, (makes sound) This is called a uvular trill. This is the r sound in France.
If you try to speak French and go to France you're going to make a mistake if you say "tray". "Tray" instead of "trrre". Now this sound is very hard for some of us non French speakers because it doesn't exist at all in English.
What you need to do is imagine the dangly bit in the back of your mouth, that's your uvular right back there. What you're going to do is push the tongue up towards that while making a sort of h sound over the top (makes sound) Practice that in the mirror, make people laugh. Now you're going to take the sound and use it when ever there is an r.
So in words like rain we doing say "rain" we say "rain". So try this phrase "Bring these red cars" (repeats phrase 3 times). Notice also that the t-h sound in "these" is changed to a zed and that's fairly common for French speakers to change the t-h sound to zeds or eses because there is no t-h sound (makes t-h sound) in French so it becomes this and that.
"Thank you so much for this" (repeats 3 times). Next feature is that the h in French is silent. Its silent so when you speak French so that we say "l'hospital" not "lopital" with an h.
So if you want to do a French accent drop your h's. Try this phrase, "How do I get to the hospital?" (repeats 3 times) So that's "ow" not "how" but "ow". Good so finally we get the vowel sounds all being very small I want you to think about barely moving your mouth so that rather than saying "yes" you say "yes".
Rather than saying "in" you say "in". All very small like this. very very small vowel sounds. Finally this is a bit stereotypical but as an actor it helps me to sort of think of creating sort of a shrug feeling, a galic "bu" sort what do you think like this. This helps me to get the accent so I mean thats' stereotypical.
Not all french people are like that but it helps me and it might help you to so give it a try.